The World's Greatest Books_ Volume 3 Part 52

France!"

"My son!" cried Catherine joyfully.

"Am I too late?" said D'Anjou.

"No. You are just in time. Listen!"

The captain of the king's guards appeared at the balcony of the king's apartment. He broke the wand he held in two places, and holding a piece in either hand, called out three times, "King Charles the Ninth is dead!"

King Charles the Ninth is dead! King Charles the Ninth is dead!"

"Charles the Ninth is dead!" said Catherine, crossing herself. "G.o.d save Henry the Third!"

All repeated the cry.

"I have conquered," said Catherine, "and the odious Bourbon shall not reign!"

The Black Tulip

"The Black Tulip," published in 1850, was the last of Alexandre Dumas' more famous stories, and ranks deservedly high among the short novels of its prolific author. Dumas visited Holland in May, 1849, in order to be present at the coronation of William III. at Amsterdam, and according to Flotow, the composer, it was the king himself who told Dumas the story of "The Black Tulip," and mentioned that none of the author's romances were concerned with the Dutch. Dumas, however, never gave any credit to this anecdote, and others have alleged that Paul Lacroix, the bibliophile, who was a.s.sisting Dumas with his novels at that time, is responsible for the plot. The question can never be answered, for who can disentangle the work of Dumas from that of his army of helpers? A feature of "The Black Tulip" is that in it is the bulb, and not a human being, that is the real centre of interest. The fate of the bulb is made of first importance, and the fortunes of Cornelius van Baerle, the tulip fancier, of Boxtel, and of Rosa, the gaoler's daughter, exciting though they are, take second place.

_I.--Mob Vengeance_

On the 20th of August, 1672, the city of The Hague was crowded in every street with a mob of people, all armed with knives, muskets, or sticks, and all hurrying towards the Buytenhof.

Within that terrible prison was Cornelius de Witt, brother of John de Witt, the ex-Grand Pensionary of Holland.

These brothers De Witt had long served the United Provinces of the Dutch Republic, and the people had grown tired of the Republic, and wanted William, Prince of Orange, for Stadtholder. John de Witt had signed the Act re-establis.h.i.+ng the Stadtholderate, but Cornelius had only signed it under the compulsion of an Orange mob that attacked his house at Dordrecht.

This was the first count against the De Witts--their objection to a Stadtholder. The second count was that the De Witts had always done their best to keep at peace with France. They knew that war with France meant ruin to Holland, but the more violent Orangists still believed that such a war would bring honour to the Dutch.

Hence the popular hatred against the De Witts. A miscreant named Tyckelaer fanned the flame against Cornelius by declaring that he had bribed him to a.s.sa.s.sinate William, the newly-elected Stadtholder.

Cornelius was arrested, brought to trial, and tortured on the rack, but no confession of guilt could be wrung from the innocent, high-souled man. Then the judges acquitted Tyckelaer, deprived Cornelius of all his offices, and pa.s.sed sentence of banishment. John de Witt had already resigned the office of Grand Pensionary.

On the 20th of August, Cornelius was to leave his prison for exile, and a fierce Orangist populace, incited to violence by the harangues of Tyckelaer, was rus.h.i.+ng to the Buytenhof prepared to do murder, and fearful lest the prisoner should escape alive. "To the gaol! To the gaol!" yelled the mob. But outside the prison was a line of cavalry drawn up under the command of Captain Tilly with orders to guard the Buytenhof, and while the populace stood in hesitation, not daring to attack the soldiers, John de Witt had quietly driven up to the prison, and had been admitted by the gaoler.

The shouts and clamour of the people could be heard within the prison as John de Witt, accompanied by Gryphus the gaoler, made his way to his brother's cell.

Cornelius learnt there was no time to be lost, but there was a question of certain correspondence between John de Witt and M. de Louvois of France to be discussed. These letters, entirely creditable though they were to the statesmans.h.i.+p of the Grand Pensionary, would have been accepted as evidence of treason by the maddened Orangists, and Cornelius, instead of burning them, had left them in the keeping of his G.o.dson, Van Baerle, a quiet, scholarly young man of Dordrecht, who was utterly unaware of the nature of the packet.

"They will kill us if these papers are found," said John de Witt, and opening the window, they heard the mob shouting, "Death to traitors!"

In spite of fingers and wrists broken by the rack, Cornelius managed to write a note.

DEAR G.o.dSON: Burn the packet I gave you, burn without opening or looking at it, so that you may not know the contents. The secrets it contains bring death. Burn it, and you will have saved both John and Cornelius.

Farewell, from your affectionate

CORNELIUS DE WITT.

Then a letter was given to Craeke, John de Witt's faithful servant, who at once set off for Dordrecht, and within a few minutes the two brothers were driving away to the city gate. Rosa, the gaoler's daughter, unknown to her father, had opened the postern, and had herself bidden De Witt's coachman drive round to the rear of the prison, and by this means the fury of the mob was, for the moment, evaded.

And now the clamour of the Orangists was at the prison door, for Tilly's horse had withdrawn on an order signed by the deputies in the town hall, and the people were raging to get within the Buytenhof.

The mob burst open the great gate, and yelling, "Death to the traitors!

To the gallows with Cornelius de Witt!" poured in, only to find the prisoner had escaped. But the escape was but from the prison, for the city gate was locked when the carriage of the De Witts drove up, locked by order of the deputies of the Town Hall, and a certain young man--who was none other than William, Prince of Orange--held the key.

Before another gate could be reached the mob, streaming from the Buytenhof, had overtaken the carriage, and the De Witts were at its mercy.

The two men, whose lives had been spent in the welfare of their country, were ma.s.sacred with unspeakable savagery, and their bodies, stripped, and hacked almost beyond recognition, were then strung up on a hastily erected gibbet in the market-place.

When the worst had been done, the young man, who had secretly watched the proceedings from the window of a neighbouring house, returned the key to the gatekeeper.

Then the prince mounted a horse which an equerry held in waiting for him, and galloped off to camp to await the message of the States. He galloped proudly, for the burghers of The Hague had made of the corpses of the De Witts a stepping stone to power for William of Orange.

_II.--Betrayed for his Bulbs_

Doctor Cornelius van Baerle, the G.o.dson of Cornelius de Witt, was in his twenty-eighth year, an orphan, but nevertheless, a really happy man. His father had ama.s.sed a fortune of 400,000 guilders in trade with the Indies, and an estate brought him in 10,000 guilders a year. He was blessed with the love of a peaceful life with good nerves, ample wealth, and a philosophic mind.

Left alone in the big house at Dordrecht, he steadily resisted all temptations to public life. He took up the study of botany, and then, not knowing what to do with his time and money, decided to go in for one of the most extravagant hobbies of the time--the cultivation of his favourite flower, the tulip. The fame of Mynheer van Baerle's tulips soon spread in the district, and while Cornelius de Witt had roused deadly hatred by sowing the seeds of political pa.s.sion, Van Baerle with his tulips won general goodwill. Yet, all unknowingly, Van Baerle had made an enemy, an implacable, relentless enemy. This was his neighbour, Isaac Boxtel, who lived next door to him in Dordrecht.

Boxtel, from childhood, had been a pa.s.sionate tulip-grower. He had even produced a tulip of his own, and the Boxtel had won wide admiration. One day, to his horror, Boxtel discovered that his next-door neighbour, the wealthy Mynheer van Baerle, was also a tulip-grower. In bitter anguish Boxtel foresaw that he had a rival who, with all the resources at his command, might equal and possibly surpa.s.s the famous Boxtel creations.

He almost choked with envy, and from the moment of his discovery lived under continual fear. The healthy pastime of tulip growing became, under these conditions, a morbid and evil occupation for Boxtel, while Van Baerle, on the other hand, totally unaware of the enmity brewing, threw himself into the business with the keenest zest, taking for his motto the old aphorism, "To despise flowers is to insult G.o.d."

So fierce was the envy that seized Boxtel that though he would have shrunk from the infamy of destroying a tulip, he would have killed the man who grew them. His own plants were neglected; it was useless and hopeless to contend against so wealthy a rival. Then Boxtel, fascinated by his evil pa.s.sion, bought a telescope, and, perched on a ladder, studied Van Baerle's tulip beds and the drying-room, the tulip-grower's sacred place.

One night he lost all moral control, and tying the hind legs of two cats together with a piece of string, he flung the animals into Van Baerle's garden. To Boxtel's bitter mortification the cats, though they made havoc of many precious plants before they broke the string, left the four finest tulips untouched.

Shortly afterwards the Haarlem Tulip Society offered a prize of 100,000 guilders to whomsoever should produce a large black tulip, without spot or blemish. Van Baerle at once thought out the idea of the black tulip.

He had already achieved a dark brown one, while Boxtel, who had only managed to produce a light brown one, gave up the quest as impossible, and could do nothing but spy on his neighbour's activities.

One evening in January 1672, Cornelius de Witt came to see his grandson, Cornelius van Baerle, and went with him alone into the sacred drying- room, the laboratory of the tulip-grower. Boxtel, with his telescope, recognised the well-known features of the statesman, and presently he saw him hand his G.o.dson a packet, which the latter put carefully away in a cabinet. This packet contained the correspondence of John de Witt and M. de Louvois.

Cornelius drove away, and Boxtel wondered what the packet contained. It could hardly be bulbs; it must be secret papers.

It was not till August, as we know, that Craeke was despatched to Van Baerle with the note bidding him destroy the packet.

Craeke arrived just when Van Baerle was nursing his precious bulbs--the bulbs of the black tulip--and his sudden entrance rudely disturbed the tulip-grower. He had not time to read the note; indeed, he was too much concerned with the welfare of his three particular bulbs to trouble about it, before a magistrate and some soldiers entered to arrest him.

Van Baerle wrapped up the bulbs in the note from his G.o.dfather, and was sent off under close custody to The Hague. The magistrate carried off the packet from the cabinet.